Taking care of parents is never easy and Keith Humphreys shares why a robot can’t replace that support.
Over the last eight months of my dad’s dwindling health, my three siblings and I provided love to my parents. However, they understandably needed much more than that. We collectively put in hundreds of hours assisting with physical tasks, sorting out logistics, managing bills and tax forms, advising on tough decisions and other forms of amateur social work.
We also shielded them from the scammers who contact older people pretending to be health care administrators demanding payment on a supposedly overdue bill or stating that they “just need to confirm” their social security number and banking details.
My parents’ situation was challenging but manageable because there were four of us kids and only two of them. But between us four, we have only five of our own children to look after us when our time of great need arrives. Population research indicates that many other adults our age and younger will have even fewer children still, or none at all.
A massive expansion of Medicare’s benefits could theoretically be used to hire people to do what adult children now do for their aging and ill parents. But the decline in generational size that is creating the shortfall in “amateur social work” makes that solution unattainable: Medicare is already groaning in part because of the weight of an unprecedented number of old people relying on a relatively small number of working age taxpayers to finance it.